Page 15 Finished Illustration

This illustration was a lot of fun to paint!  All the colors are very cool in temperature which is very different from my previous illustrations.  I wanted to use cool colors in this illustration since it is a haunted house scene.  Normally painting with cool colors is a challenge for me because whenever I do, I have a tendency to go too dark in value.  Page 16 is a warm beach scene which will be a striking shift in temperature compared to this page.

Page 14 Finished Illustration

I finished page 14 tonight.  Had to make a lot of adjustments to the scan to make the colors match the original.  The painting is mostly transparent paint but the fire and lighting is almost completely opaque.  I am learning something new with each illustration I work on.  So far it is quite rewarding.  At this current pace, I hope to have at least five more illustrations finished before the school year ends.  I have adjusted my work schedule so that I am able to get some painting time in six days a week.  Fridays are devoted entirely to lesson planning.  Onto page 15!

Page 13 Finished Illustration

I'm really happy with the way this page turned out.  It scanned well, I only had to adjust the yellow-oranges in the scan.  I'm getting a rhythm going with these and I seem to be finishing them at a rate of one illustration every 2 weeks or so.  I have about 16 weeks of teaching to get through as well before I am free for the summer.  Fridays and Saturdays are strictly for creating lesson plans for classes, the remaining days are used to focus on getting these illustrations finished.  I should have 19 or 20 illustrations done when the school year is over.

Page 12 Finished Illustration

I finished this illustration last night.  So far I think it is my favorite one.  I had a lot of fun with the color theory and it scanned really well.  I only had to adjust the blue-greens and yellow-greens.  For some reason turquoise always scans as a de-saturated blue and yellow-green always scans more green than yellow.  Yellow-green also scans much more saturated.  The adjustment layers were easy to do this time, much easier than the previous ones.  What you see in this scanned image is remarkably close to the original art.  Onto page 13!

Page 11 Finished Illustration

I finished page 11 last night.  I'm quite happy with the results, especially the colors which scanned quite well.  This was fun to paint and the atmospheric perspective looks good.  The main challenge was softening the main fireball using opaques.  Opaque paint does not like to be blended using a wet brush.  You can use a damp brush but even then, the paint likes to form hard edges.  I will start painting page 12 tomorrow, I hope to have two more pages done before the winter break is over.

Page Ten Finished Illustration

Finished page ten tonight.  Creating the digital file was a bit of a pain - I had to create a lot of correction layers to make it match the original as best I could.  All the colors lean towards a yellow-green.  What's interesting with this color theory is that turquoise appears blue.  The blue jeans on the cyclops is actually a turquoise color.  The cyclops in the center has the darkest values and the most saturated colors, making him the subject.  The fox is still high contrast but I decided he was a bit too small to be the subject of the painting.  In the next painting I will have lots of vibrant blues and violets.  It should be the most colorful illustration yet!  Stay tuned.

Page Nine Finished Illustration

Finished the illustration for page nine tonight.  Surprisingly not a whole lot of edits to the digital scan.  The only colors that had to be adjusted were the yellow-oranges and magenta.  The color is punched up in this one whereas the first seven illustrations are fairly muted.  I did this by mixing in some primary cyan into the payne's grey/ burnt sienna paint that I use for the initial underpainting.  Depending on the color theory, I will mix different colors into the payne's grey when i do the underpainting from now on.  It certainly makes the illustration much more vibrant.  It is okay for the first few pages to be more subtle and muted since that is really the setup for the story.  The remaining pages should be more brighter particularly if they are exciting action scenes like this one.